David Waldstreicher > Quotes

“Only greed, and lust for power, could explain how “the professed enemies of negro and every other species of slavery, should themselves join in the adoption of a constitution whose very basis is despotism and slavery.”15”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“Butler reiterated the Deep South line, minus the Virginian apologetics: “The security the South[er]n States want is that their negroes, may not be taken from them, which some gentlemen within or without doors, have a very good mind to do.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“Why wasn’t the prohibition of the slave trade by the Continental Congress in 1774 an ironclad precedent? “Can we suppose what was morally evil in the year 1774, has become in the year 1788, morally good?” Perhaps tired of reading about people like themselves as living proof of the need for better leadership, the dissenters turned their antifederalist antislavery into a blast against the founders themselves.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“Even to contemplate, much less codify, this much governance, and that much economic regulation, was itself risky after a revolution against imperial governance and regulation. In the end, the founders used slavery to limit government while allowing slaves to be governed both locally and nationally. In fewer, smaller ways, slavery was itself limited. More decisively, slavery was alternately winked at and silenced as a subject of political debate and adjudication. In the process, it was not so much forgotten as contained.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“American revolutionaries struggled to keep the entire Western world focused on their potential political enslavement, rather than on their African slaves’ actual bondage.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“Africans and their descendants were not being defined as three-fifths of a person, as is sometimes said, for that would have implied that the men among them deserved three-fifths of a vote, when they had none, or had three-fifths of a person’s rights before the law, when they had much less than that, usually. Rather, their presence was being acknowledged as a source of power and of wealth, for their owners.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“American liberty won the war; it undermined slavery in many places and in some minds, while in the end it confirmed slavery nationally.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“We cannot have our creative founding fathers without acknowledging their disturbingly artful contributions to the politics of slavery.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“What implications did this understanding of process have for the place of slavery in the ratification struggle? On the one hand, the framers had artfully hidden the evidence of compromise and even the subject itself in silence and ambiguity. A quick ratification would, in effect, ratify the decision not to unpack the ambiguities or spell out the compromises.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“In July, Benjamin Franklin wrote to one of his British friends that the royal governors of North Carolina and Virginia had been “exciting an insurrection among the Blacks.” Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s governor, began to get information and assistance from local slaves, then threatened to arm slaves in defense of Crown government. When patriots took over armories and forced him offshore, Dunmore issued a proclamation on November 7 promising freedom to fugitive slaves who fought under his banner. Once again, as in the Mansfield case, African Americans helped turn rumors and possibilities into facts, telling each other that the whole purpose, or at least the likely result, of the expected British invasion of the South would be to liberate them. A similar set of events took place in South Carolina, where the idea that “they will all be sett free” became “common talk throughout the Province” among slaves.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The revision process that eliminated the slavery passage and produced the final document suggests a growing concern with the fact of slaves in arms, as well as the compromises with slaveholding and slave-trading interests Jefferson remembered. Benjamin Franklin, who served on the drafting committee, suggested the insertion of “[He has] excited domestic insurrections among us” into the now-culminating accusation that the king had “endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”18 The revised Declaration, in other words, made slave insurrection, with Indian warfare, the latest and perhaps greatest example of the king’s tyranny. The Declaration, then, had turned from antislavery in draft to anti-antislavery (if not proslavery) in publication.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“Slavery was “inconsistent with the genius of republicanism,” Martin insisted. “When our own liberties were at stake, we warmly felt for the common rights of man.” There was no logical reason why a government bound to protect the states against invasions and insurrections could not regulate the migration of slaves. Martin remained a states’ righter, but he still could not comprehend why the government could not be strong in interstate matters like slavery while leaving the states to themselves on domestic issues. The inconsistency suggested that within the structure of the Constitution, crucial liberties had been sacrificed, and not for the common good.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“That these clauses do not directly address slavery makes sense given the importance of legislative supremacy to the framers’ Constitution.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The pass given the slave trade added insult to the injury, creating a political incentive to enslave more Africans.12”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“That President Washington decided that slavery was wrong yet felt bound by the Constitution to do nothing about it captures the main effects that the Constitution had on slavery and American politics. The framers’ Constitution disapproved of slavery by implication but made it harder to do much about it nationally.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“J.G.A. Pocock writes of a “Machiavellian moment” in the history of republics when political actors realize that republican political institutions, which depend on the virtue of citizens, are evanescent and corruptible, making both drastic action and the republic’s fall inevitable.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The Committee on Detail went about its work boldly, especially where it concerned the slavery question. Its makeup made a key difference. The South Carolinian John Rutledge joined Edmund Randolph, James Wilson, and two New Englanders, Nathaniel Gorham and Oliver Ellsworth, who had participated in discussions about sectional compromise. Its report has been called a “monument to Southern craft and gall,” even a hijacking of the Constitution for proslavery purposes.34”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The presumption that the people themselves should contemplate, discuss, and ratify the Constitution through their representatives in convention presupposed the active use of reason and criticism. To rush the process of ratification under presumption of a crisis, as Federalists did successfully in Pennsylvania and Delaware, suggested ulterior motives. The secrecy that had allowed for frank debate and creative deals in convention could be—and quickly was—reinterpreted as conspiratorial and undemocratic.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“However subtle or overt, the compromise of 1787 solidified the practice of deal making between increasingly self-aware sections defined by slavery.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“Domestic” could mean many things, but in the Declaration of Independence the term “domestic insurrections” had been used to describe Britain’s arming of slaves against their American masters.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“States with slaves had more votes in the Congress than states without them, making the three-fifths clause reason enough to reject the document.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“To give more power to Southerners was to hand the federal government over to the least egalitarian people in the United States.13”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“If rum was “the life blood of colonial commerce,” nothing could be more threatening to traditional British rights than interference with the rum trade. To be British, indeed, meant to translate economic interests like trade into questions of rights, liberties, and fundamental law. And economic interests, in New England as well as in Virginia, included slaves and the things slaves made.5”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“In growing their government, the framers and their constituents created fundamental laws that sustained human bondage.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“Instead, the founders’ creative energies had turned disagreement, even contradiction, regarding slavery into a structure to manage doubts and conflicts about nationhood as well as slavery itself. The business of slavery had not been left unfinished so much as it had been leveraged.51”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The Constitution guaranteed a republican form of government to the states—but didn’t its protections for slavery undermine republican government as well? The security for the slave trade in Article I, Section 9, he wrote, went against what other states had already done to purify themselves of slavery’s corruption, and “is especially scandalous and inconsistant in a people, who have asserted their own liberty by the sword, and which dangerously enfeebles the districts, wherein the laborers are bondsmen. The words are dark and ambiguous; such as no plain man of common sense would have used, [and] are evidently chosen to conceal from Europe, that in this enlightened country, the practice of slavery has its advocates among men in the highest stations.” The Constitution partook of propaganda. The corollary: don’t trust men in the highest stations.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The founders’ Constitution avoided theorizing African slavery as right or wrong, as an Old World holdover or a New World innovation, as a pillar of the Republic or an anachronism headed for the dustbin of history, as something that could be legislated or something that could not, because they could not agree on these things. The text they enshrined allowed for different possible results: slavery’s continuance, spread, or eventual end.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“Will it not be said, that the greatest Sticklers for Liberty, are its worst Enemies?” Worst of all, in Hughes’s mind, was Benjamin Franklin, head of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, for helping “frame a Constitution which evidently has a Tendency not only to enslave all those whom it ought to protect; but avowedly encourages” the enslavement of others. As soon as it was adopted, politicians like Franklin would say it was “called for by the people,” Hughes observed, though really it was nothing but a specious deal between North and South: “If you will permit us to import Africans as Slaves, we will consent that you may export Americans, as soldiers.” The supremacy and treaty clauses meant that Americans, like Hessians during the war, could be “detached and transported to the West or East-indies.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“William Knox, the undersecretary of state for the American colonies, actually quoted Franklin as having told him that Parliament’s right to tax Pennsylvanians “is equivalent to an authority to declare all white persons in that province Negroes.” Knox himself responded elsewhere, perhaps sarcastically,”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

“The revolution to preserve British traditions had changed things, and it had liberated tens of thousands of slaves (recent estimates vary from 25,000 to 100,000). But it had also preserved slavery. The war had in part derived from the desire of slaveholders to protect their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, goals they pursued by trying to keep hold of their slaves.”
― David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification